During this course, we’ll be making exploratory images to expand your visual vocabulary. We'll create pieces that are expressive, meditative, or 'design-y' to instigate, evoke, experiment, record, explain, or to try out a media. The first two weeks are experimental and exploratory; we won’t be concerned with meaning or communication (although, to be honest, every image does exist in a context, and therefore communicates—or can convey—meaning, connotation, associations, and expressiveness).
In the second two weeks, we’ll invite the images to deliberately and intentionally carry meaning and communication through relational moves like juxtaposition, composition, and context. Everyone has a natural, intuitive way of putting things together. We’ll look at developing and expanding the range of approaches for putting things together, composing page spreads with your images. Since nothing exists without context, we look at how to intentionally drive the image’s connotations, meanings and associations generated through elements of composition and “visual contrasts.” through style, juxtaposition, closure and figures of speech.
Ultimately, we will take the images that you create and make a book from them.

From the lesson

Week 3: Composition is Relational

In this third week, we will define and investigate core principles of composition, and begin to compose simple spreads for your book.